So Emma Goldman's Still a Threat?

by Ronald Radosh

Mr. Radosh is Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, and co-author with Mary Habeck, of Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War.

That anarchist agitator is stirring up trouble once again, even though she
passed away in 1940. No doubt Emma Goldman would have been more than pleased.
Her ancient arguments, it seems, have put fear into the hearts of officials
at the University of California at Berkeley. The university's associate vice
chancellor for research, Robert Price, was quoted in the New York Times
as saying that statements of Goldman's used by the archivist of the university's
Emma Goldman Papers Project for fund raising were making a "political point,"
which he argues was "inappropriate in an official university solicitation."

The quotes Mr. Price deleted from the fund raising appeal  which are
posted on the archive's website
have Goldman saying in 1915, on the eve of World War I, that "in the face
of this approaching disaster," people "not yet overcome by war madness"
should "raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people
to this crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them." In
a second quote from 1902, the anarchist leader says that free speech in America
was so threatened that people would "soon be obliged to meet in cellars,
or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door
neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open."

What evidently upset Berkeley administrators was that the appeal might be viewed
as a political statement by the university, one that was clearly opposed to
American policy in Iraq, especially on the issue of whether the country should
go to war. How Mr. Price thought that anyone would take notice or even find
out about the appeal is itself strange--especially since his censorship has
made it page one news.

Responding to the charge that the appeal was political, archivist historian
Candace Falk shrewdly noted that the quotes were Goldman's views, and not that
of the University of California. Ms. Falk acknowledged, however, that she had
selected these quotes because they resonated in the present day.

Seemingly, what we have here is a case of political correctness run amok--the
very kind of politically correct thought control and censorship usually endorsed
by the political left. Now, that endorsement of political correctness has come
back to haunt the left, which finds that some of the sentiments they favor worry
administrators who are concerned with offending the Bush administration and
perhaps endangering Berkeley's federal funding.

Ms. Falk, like her hero Goldman, knows how to generate publicity. Her fund
raising letter was to be sent to a list of 3,000 potential donors; now quite
a few more people know about it, and the project is likely to receive more donations
than they ever thought possible.

The argument of Mr. Price's office, that the letter was an inappropriate political
statement, rings false. One look at the project's Web site and it becomes clear
that the papers exist not just to preserve the archive of a major historical
figure in America's past, but also to endorse Goldman as a hero and role model
for today. The testimonials on the site are from well known left-wing activists,
including Howard Zinn, Gloria Steinem, Cora Weiss, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and
others. Mr. Zinn talks about the project's intent to "bring the word, the
spirit of Emma Goldman to ever larger numbers of Americans"; Ms. Weiss
about how "women need role models on how to be effective advocates, and
how to make a perfect blintz" (at least Ms. Weiss, like Goldman, has a
good sense of humor), and Ms. vanden Heuvel notes that Goldman¹s writings
were "filled with acute often prescient, observations." Berkeley¹s
vice chancellor hardly could have been surprised at the use to which Ms. Falk
put Goldman's words. They were meant to get anti-war sympathizers and radicals
to contribute to the archive.

Of course, the one area that the Goldman Papers Project almost completely
ignores is Goldman's strident and forceful anti-Bolshevism. The high-school
curriculum they present includes the topics of "immigration, freedom of
expression, women's rights, anti-militarism and the art and literature of social
change." Anti-Communism, a major cause in Goldman's latter years, is absent.
The introduction does acknowledge that Goldman left Soviet Russia "in disgust
and disappointment," furious over the Bolsheviks' betrayal "of the
ideals of the revolution." That nod to her views of communism hardly does
justice to the forcefulness of her beliefs. As Goldman wrote, "how we used
to dream of the wonderful thing come true in Russia. But like all dreams there
is an awakening which is hard to bear even for the strongest of us."

Indeed, when my cousin, the American Jewish anarchist Jacob Abrams, was released
from prison for violation of the Espionage and Sedition Act in America and deported
to the Soviet Union, Goldman wrote a friend that, "Abrams and friends are
all right where they are, believe me. Certainly better than their alternative
[the Soviet Union] get me?" Abrams and his fellow prisoners, Goldman wrote,
"will not be very grateful for having been taken out of Atlanta [penitentiary]
and sent to the Russian Penitentiary." One suspects that the people the
Goldman Project hope to raise funds from would not respond positively to any
emphasis on Goldman¹s disillusionment -- or her fierce opposition to so
many leftists shibboleths.

As for Saddam Hussein, one suspects that even Emma Goldman  an opponent
of Lenin and Trotsky and Mussolini and Hitler  might herself have had
second thoughts about the brutal tyranny Saddam has brought to Iraq, and the
threat to world peace that his regime poses in the nuclear age. She might even
have awoken from the dream of pacifism and seen the need for military action,
hard as such a step might have been for her to bear. 1915, after all, is hardly
similar to 2003.